Oct. 14, 2024

Exploring the disruptive impact of climate change

Glenn Fox

You might not expect a national security research institution to play a key role in climate science research. However, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), scientists are making exciting advances in predicting future climate change, while also connecting that research with insights regarding how climate change is likely to impact our national security, energy security, and infrastructure resilience.

How did this somewhat surprising connection come about? It started in the 1950s, when LLNL developed an atmospheric general circulation model to study the effects of nuclear tests. In the 1990s, LLNL scientists started exploring whether humans are changing the climate, and they created a tool to evaluate and improve global climate models. Over the last decade, LLNL’s climate research teams shifted their focus to explore the potential disruptive impacts of climate change.

Along the way, as LLNL and other Department of Energy (DOE) research labs have deployed powerful supercomputing resources, scientists started leveraging these capabilities to build and refine climate models, at the scale needed to predict the long-term effects of climate change.

Today, LLNL’s climate science experts play key roles on multidisciplinary teams that are exploring how climate change will impact our Lab’s core missions. For example, they are merging climate models with infrastructure models to understand how climate change may impact our power grid. This type of insight—available at the regional level through regionally refined models—guides decision making regarding energy infrastructure planning and future investments in renewable energy resources.

LLNL’s Physical and Life Sciences Directorate is home to many of these climate science experts, including physicists, atmospheric scientists, and computer scientists—who typically are part of research groups based in our directorate’s Atmospheric, Earth, and Energy Science Division.

They also collaborate with experts at other DOE labs to build better climate models, such as the multi-lab effort to develop the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) project, led by LLNL. The E3SM project includes the Simple Cloud-Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model (SCREAM), built to run on exascale computers. SCREAM operates at a much higher resolution than conventional climate models, and it can capture microclimate data that’s needed for climate adaptation planning.

The journey from LLNL’s early atmospheric models developed in the 1950s to today’s exascale predictive tools truly reflects the expansion of our research from a national security focus to our multidisciplinary research environment, where predicting climate change impacts has become a national security priority.

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